The history of synths (teaches us a lesson.)

Get a brief history of synths from the early 20th century to the present day, in this talk presented by Mylar Melodies! We'll cover legends such as Bob Moog, Don Buchla, Wendy Carlos, Daphne Oram, and the history lesson will teach us a valuable lesson about how to make the best of synths.
⚙ Browse synths at Gear4music: gear4music.me/3EzyG4A
⚙ Browse modular synths at Gear4music: gear4music.me/3rJlzZw
⚙ Browse all software synths at Gear4music: gear4music.me/3EAkeZZ
⚙ See the plugins Gear4music has on sale right now: gear4music.me/398Zop5
Music by modular synthesist Emile Sprague, taken from the KZbin Audio Library.
Thanks to Marc Doty for valuable advice and historic images of Don Buchla and his machines - and noted on the fact that the early Buchla synths did not have wavefolders!
00:00 Introduction to this miniseries
0:48 What is a synthesizer and ways to use them
2:50 Synths vs 'real' musicians
3:44 The RCA MKII Synthesiser
4:44 The Theremin
5:49 Meet Bob Moog
6:38 The Moog Modular
7:32 Meet Subtractive Synthesis!
8:46 Switched On Bach
9:52 Meet Don Buchla, West Coast Synthesis
10:58 Silver Apples of the Moon
11:26 Tape Music Pioneers
12:55 The Minimoog Model D
15:30 The first golden age of synths
16:29 Enter the disruptive DX7
18:20 Meet FM Synthesis
19:09 The computer revolution
20:11 The big lesson
21:18 Subscribe and stay tuned!

[@briankehew579]

The Buchla was more than a year after the Moog: November 1965. Buchla knew of the Moog system which was publicized nationally in the AES Journal. The Moog also did not have a keyboard: many of thrir first systems did not have one - it was an option. The SFTMC or Buchla system simply did not offer rhat option until later.

[@johnathonyoung5631]

As a newbie to synths, I went down the learning rabbit hole, 40hrs of youtube later, I understood, it makes whatever sound, nothing is set. It was the history that helped be understand that and it’s just a sound wave being manipulated. Thanks for making this in an effort to consolidate and assist.

[@Asterra2]

Ah yes. I am once again wistfully reminded of the fact that I used to possess a wonderful, pure MPEG2 capture of BBC's Alchemists of Sound clocking in at some 1.5GB, but lost it to a hard drive crash, and now I have to settle for the same miserable ~360p, 25fps render you can find pretty much anywhere, since it was never made commercially available. A sad state of affairs for one of my top 3 most beloved documentaries.

[@MatsueMusic]

Where is the rest!

[@rozzgrey801]

I read that the inventor of the voltage controlled modular synth concept was Harald Bode, who conceived it in 1959, built and toured with this synth in 1962 and gave talks that were attended by Bob Moog and Donald Buchla. Bode's machine inspired Moog, who then worked with Bode developing modules like the frequency shifter and vocoder.

[@markusfuller]

Brilliant informative video Alex. I look forward to the rest of your journey through this series.

[@Gear4musicSynthsTech]

Thanks very much for this Markus! 👍

[@Met_Ethio]

Simon and Garfunkel had a surprising use of synth in their song "Save the Life of My Child" they recorded in 1967 and released in 68! I was blown away when I heard it, i had to check the date again.

[@user-jy3io4iz2p]

S & G were always very focussed on recording quality. They really stood out in pop for this, not just their choice of instruments.

[@andresplemons]

great video, thanks for making this series

[@MrScarabey]

Looking forward for the next lesson

[@NiElsir]

Calm and relaxing watch and listen. Really enjoyed this. Thanks

[@localhost4460]

Mylar Melodies is always awesome. I'm most excited for Soma's coming ReFlex which seems to expand upon synthesis origins :)

[@Jim47ww]

Fantastic video thanks. But it does seem to stand alone in the 'Learn Synth Series' playlist. Where did the rest go please? Looking forward to seeing more.

[@user-jy3io4iz2p]

Subsequent 37, Jupiter 50 and KingKorg is my trinity topped with a TR-8s 😊

[@beehtovenheadass5610]

Very insightful video thank you for posting

[@rosewurkz]

Thanks for the little history ☺️

[@bux77]

Looking forward to the rest of the series

[@Gear4musicSynthsTech]

Thanks Andrew! Watch this space 👍

[@cobraofearth]

Pretty crazy how the theremin was made to sound like a saw, which was a really popular instrument at the time . like, a saw that you cut wood with!

[@philiptownsend4026]

I bought Switched on Bach LP in 1971 and ever since have had a big interest in synths, but never had or tried to play one. That is about to change, I have an Evolution keyboard controller, decent computer and decent speakers. I am researching soft synths to find something to start with, there are many and it is a big confusing field. Tyrrell N6 is looking good to me with it's 80's analog sounds, it has a lot of tutorials, a good manual and thousands of patches to import and learn from. All free. I enjoyed your very informative presentation, excellent delivery, sober and sane, unlike many that have repelled me.

[@GeorgeLocke]

Awesome video!

[@riftwytch]

Nice overview. It's odd that you jumped from the Theremin to Moog, but overlooked the Novachord, a polyphonic synthesizer designed in the 1930s.

[@rexterrocks]

Indeed, it was the very first polyphonic synthesizer. The Clavioline is also important, it dates from the early '40s and was famously used on the British 60's hit 'Telstar'

[@dr.getter7118]

@@rexterrocks let us not forget about the Telharmonium, fellas. End of the 19th century, invented even before the appearence of triode vacumm tubes. That was the first electronic sound synthesizer, and it was fully polyphonic too! =)

[@improbablesafari1491]

And LeCaine’s electronic sackbut - there are many other examples, and everyone should check out the “120 years” website to learn about them. That said, edits are made any time history is told. At the most basic level it’s a function of language - it’s literally impossible to say everything all at once, let alone attempt to do so and manage to say anything intelligible in 20 minutes. Though the focus was clearly a survey of relatively well known major inventions, it’s not lost on me that choices were made to make this a more inclusive telling. I applaud those choices. 👏👏👏

[@briankehew579]

Neither Novachord or Telharmonium are synthesizers. They have preset ranges, architecture, order and options. Hammond and Lowery organs, theremins etc are not yet synthesizers - just electronic instruments.

[@JustLeonOfficial]

Amazing video, i unironically teared up.

[@latonka6403]

Great video

[@davesou1]

This video is really great. Very informative. Cannot wait for the next one? Is it out yet?

[@crackbaby4444]

Wow that was an incredibly well put together video

[@Gear4musicSynthsTech]

Thank you!!

[@countzero1136]

I never regretted selling my DX7 - sure it sounded great and was very nice to play, but FM programming using that clunky UI was a bloody nightmare, so I decided to let it go. I DO regret selling my Roland SH101 though :(

[@entropybentwhistle]

If you liked the sound but hated the process on the Yamaha, Korg’s Opsix series is a good hardware option. Once you have the basics of FM explained to you, the carrier and operator knobs and filter section of the Opsix gives you the sound creation and tweaking capability that is really a necessity, but Yamaha completely overlooked because of its newness in the ‘80s. The Elektron Digitone is a decent option as well, due to its compactness, but has only 4 operators and carriers, compared to the Opsix’ set of six. Of course, there are quite a few soft synth FM synths available, but I’m not much of a software guy, so I can’t offer any useful opinion of them.

[@chrisakaschulbus4903]

I don't want a synth. I was never even interested in them at all... Yet here i am, watched this 21 minute video and left a like...

[@JgHobley]

Great video!

[@Gear4musicSynthsTech]

Thank you Jon! 👍

[@sauce_aux]

And they got the right person for this, indeed 👌🏽

[@cyberyogicowindler2448]

Thanks, but I only miss here some mentioning of pre-Moog era instruments. Inventions like the Variophone, Mixtur-Trautonium or Ondes Martenot could synthesize plenty of very complex sounds long before that. On my playlist "music keyboard & sound chip history" I have collected much info about them.

[@CarlosYounes]

Muito boa sua iniciativa de contar um pouco da história da música eletrônica. Maravilhoso o seu estúdio e o vídeo foi muito bem produzido. Congratulations! Porém, na minha opinião, você resumiu demais, omitiu autores, synths e tecnologias muito interessantes e importantes para o desenvolvimento do mundo dos Sintetizadores. É um assunto para vários vídeos ou um bem longo. Thank You very much The best regards. :)

[@MRL8770]

What a great video! I love how you included all these gorgeous promo graphics of old synths. I also like how you mentioned the pre-synth era of electronic music. Personally I would argue that DX7 absolutely did sound very cold compared to analogue substracive synths, but in my opinion that was one of its great strengths. It really was a different, new and interesting sound, just unnecessarily held back by one of the worst control panels in history of synths that made people avoid creating their own patches at all cost.

[@therealniksongs]

The DX-7 's control panel, was, like all commercial designs, a necessary compromise--a trade off. The control panel from the hyper expensive DX-1 (almost seven times the price of a DX-7) was really what was needed to make FM programming easier and more on the level of ease (or difficulty) that the average analog synth player was accustomed to, but it would have priced the DX-7 out of its intended market. My first synth was a DX-7 and so I never had to "unlearn" all the methods of analog programming. Starting with a clean sheet, I found the DX's programming system logical and understandable, and found that the factory presets were mostly useful sounds that could serve the player who didn't want to dive into programming while serving as good jumping off points for those who did. As I learned my way around, I wound up having a lot of fun as I ventured into the latter category although the tiny display and single data entry slider did not make for changes "on the fly", and certainly not while playing live! Having separate controls for all the functions and parameters would have been great, but not if I couldn't afford the synth! Seeing that Yamaha sold something like 180,000 DX-7s at around $2,000 each ($360,000,000) and only about 115 DX-1s at $13,500 each, ($1,552,500) --a good Econ 101 example of the effect of price on demand--I would have to say they made the right decisions--and they absolutely dominated the music of the mid-1980s. FM is capable of some amazing things and a properly designed and programmed FM synth can sound as rich and warm as you want. Yamaha's own 8-operator FS1R and the new FM-X engine in the Montage and MODX are proof of that. That being said, those great analog monsters like the CS-80, Jupiter 8, Prophet 5 and OB-series are incredible and sound absolutely glorious. I love them all.

[@cyberyogicowindler2448]

@@therealniksongs DX7 vs. analogue control panel was the same thing like now cars with touchscreen dashboard instead of physical knobs and switches - with the huge difference that touchscreen operation while driving a car is grossly dangerous to life while at a synth it only spoils fun of making music.

[@countzero1136]

If the DX7 had proper controls instead of that dreadful button panel and crappy display then I would have certainly hung on to mine, but I sold it in the late 80s because programming it was just too much of a headache :(

[@MRL8770]

@@countzero1136 the closest I've seen to "proper controls" on an FM synth is Korg opsix. However, given I own one, I have to say that there's still a lot of room for improvement. They are great for performance, but programming still involves some menu diving.

[@countzero1136]

@@MRL8770 Yeah I don't think that FM is ever going to be as easy to patch as traditional subtractive, but also agree that more can (and needs to) be done. Sam from the Look Mum No Computer channel recently set up a full analog control panel for his FM synth which is built from Sega Megadrive consoles (that's Genesis to those in the US) and that looked to making things a whole lot simpler. Let's not forget that, at its heart, FM is still a mostly analog architecture, but all commercial FM synths use a completely digital control system, mostly through the necessity of avoiding the need for hundreds of control knobs. Korg have made things a LOT easier with the opsix, but even then, FM is a long way behind old-school subtractive synthesis when it comes to interactive control, particularly in a live performance scenario

[@FetzAV]

Cool video, thanks for sharing the knowledge. Looking forward to more of this series. What is the lesson synth history teaches us? Did I miss that part? I was hoping for an explanation of that statement. Cheers!

[@Gear4musicSynthsTech]

Thanks! In a nutshell - "Synths can inspire totally new forms of music and sound, if we're prepared to let them guide us to it."

[@kentxx12]

What about the ARP 2500/2600 that many just love in historiy of synth?

[@Gear4musicSynthsTech]

Just unfortunately had to cut some history out for timing - ARP was a legend as you rightly point out! Here's Mylar doing a video all about the 2600 however: kzbin.info/www/bejne/d2O4dJqprs13g5I

[@BdotRASS]

Been looking to dip my toes into the world of synth; are there any super simple adsr & wave editable synths that're midi controllable?

[@countzero1136]

All modern synths will have MIDI, and a lot of the older ones have MIDI upgrade kits available as after market products, though getting them fitted is not always trivial, with much depending on the design of the synth in question. As a general rule, MIDI-to-CV/Gate adapters are a simple plug-in box for most old monophonic synths, whereas fitting the MIDI kit to a huge polyphonic beast like the Yamaha CS80 is most definitely a professional job...

[@BdotRASS]

@@countzero1136 thanks for the response I was just looking for a basic synth that I could control with a fishman connect. I ended up buying an OP-1 from a friend but have not been able to get it to talk with any midi controller I own. Think I need a host but all the hosts I found are usb to din only and both my controllers and op1 are usb devices. Honestly, trying to figure it out has been a sizable headache thusfar.

[@NuisanceMan]

You left out Harald Bode, who built a keyboard-driven synthesizer in 1937.

[@countzero1136]

Also no mention of the Ondes Martenot was made in the late 1920s, around the same time as the theremin, and had a keyboard with simple aftertouch capability, and was one of the first of what we could really call a synth. It was a very weird instrument, but sounded amazing and working examples today are extremely rare, though there are modern reproductions with MIDI in addition to the kind of esoteric control of the original. The original was much favoured by British TV and film composer Barry Gray, who used it extensively on his soundtrack work for many of the Gerry Anderson TV shows Later instruments like the Clavioline, used by several 60s pop musicians (most notably the tornadoes on their hit record "telstar"), also borrowed quite heavily from the Ondes

[@VCEduardo]

Where are the next episodes? 😢

[@gregorykulinski2186]

Every thing you touch it's famtastic creation, where it's love there its ceation , The number six it's creation.

[@indacut1209]

Sooo where's the rest of this series? :(

[@crey3361]

Man, synthesizers are so wierd and interessting. It Amazes me every time

[@geoffk777]

As a stratosphere level overview, this works Ok. But you skipped over many important points. For example, we didn't just jump from the Theramin to the Moog. There was the Hammond Organ, the Mixtur Trautonium, the Ondes Martinot, the Hammond Novachord and many other interesting instruments. I think that an important developmet is also the democratization of synths. Until the 1980's synths--especially polyphonic ones, were for rich people. Even a basoc synth could cost as much as a car. Now, even hardware synths are quite cheap and some capable softsynths or apps are literally free. So the barriers to musicians have largely been removed. Finally, even outside of computers, innovations like MIDI really changed how synths are used and played. And you mentioned samplers, but the combination of PCM and synthsis with instruments like the Korg M1 or Roland JV-1000 really revolutionized the market in the 1990s and dethroned FM synthesis. In all, a good start, but it's a much bigger story than you can cover in 20 minutes, even as an overview/intro.

[@vinylarchaeologist]

2 words you should’ve mentioned at least once: Harald Bode.

[@Gear4musicSynthsTech]

Very fair point 👍

[@enochroot9438]

great idea for a series. Appreciate the classic synths and lessons learned from them but don't step over that line into becoming a synth snob...some of the new synths coming out are brilliant machines that can hold their own against the old school idols

[@Gear4musicSynthsTech]

Strongly agree, we're living in a new golden age for synths and are even getting amazing remixes of things from the past combined with things from the future! If there was a lesson here, it's to embrace everything, since all gear has its strengths.

[@michaelbaum4568]

Where is the next video?

[@modularmuse]

I thought there would be a nod to the ARP Odyssey especially after mentioning the MiniMoog, just ask Herbie Hancock.

[@Gear4musicSynthsTech]

You're right - there's so many legends which didn't get a shoutout in this, maybe in a sequel?

[@SansNeural]

@@Gear4musicSynthsTech A quiet legend is PAiA. They started making synth kits ~1972 and still sell modular synth kits today. Their user group magazine "Polyphony" ultimately became "Electronic Musician" magazine.

[@tormentakid]

you didn't mention sholpo's variophone, it was used in a very early soviet cartoon called "the thief", it used paper cutouts of soundwaves pd. also important to mention the music wendy carlos would do later on, mainly the soundtracks for the shining and tron, and also that she was an immensely relevant figure for trans musicians too :) and it's cool you used her right name and pronouns, since *way* too many modern articles still don't pd2. also need to mention the goat Mort Garson

[@bike_monday_]

I think your are under paid as a voice actor. You should take the Attenborough legacy.

[@rogerhobden7670]

Like +++++

[@robertzantay5923]

You should get in touch with me, I worked with Ciani, Vangelis, and many other pioneers of electronic music. I was the first call Lyricon and Yamaha WX-7 controllers for synthesizers. I was usually hired by keyboard players to bring human expression to the synths.

[@l1fef0rm]

"cold" and "warm" are not good descriptors when it comes to sound.

[@l1fef0rm]

Isn't it what the artist does with the tools that make a track or sound "cold" or "warm"?

[@barncat7943]

I use cool and warm to describe music all the time

[@acousvnt]

They're perfectly clear to me.

[@MarkoDeLaVoota]

how would you name it ?

[@GeorgeLocke]

It's weird cuz I thought he was just a talking pair of hands.

[@Gear4musicSynthsTech]

🙌

[@mcshafty1]

I enjoyed your video, but your suppositions and conclusions seem to be completely subjective. Good stuff but factually nonsense - just saying

[@peterpeper4837]

That is really the wrong mic for your voice, nasal with no lows